This year, I was invited to view some of Singapore’s National Day Parade events from the rooftop of The Esplanade (a performing arts centre) which is situated near the edge of Marina Bay where the festivities take place. Singapore always celebrates it’s birthday in style with a series of performances which are capped off with the highly anticipated, crowd favorite fireworks show. The ticketed portion of events were held at the floating platform to the left of us (our vantage point was not good enough to see the happenings on stage unfortunately) but the water events were right in front of us, as were most of the fireworks. None of us were able to acquire tickets for the live performance apparently because they are randomly distributed to the locals who apply for inclusion in the drawing for the tickets. That’s what I was told. Anyways, it must have been awesome judging from all the singing, cheering and laughing!

Some of the stuff I got to see were the Navy parachute divers, Parachuting in wet suits and flippers. Then there were wing suit equipped paratroopers jumping from a club record altitude that was so high I couldn’t see them, even though they were bright red.

There were squadrons of helicopters, fighter jets, bombers and surveillance planes doing fly bys and a few stunts as well as a squadron of floating cannons performing gun salutes. It was quite inspiring to see the personnel so methodical in their procedures to fire off the cannons but also frustrating, for me, because I wanted to see them go through the whole routine faster as if they were doing it for real. Anyways, I’m glad they performed at ceremonial speeds because it was harder than I thought to capture the fire coming out of the cannon muzzle. After several tries, I finally caught one. I also was able to catch the commemorative F-15 with afterburner rings (a first for me).

As the day wore on, I got to see what ‘powderworks’ were, I found them so interesting I wrote a post about them here on Steemit. So the time has come for the fireworks and I thought I was prepared. I was told where the fireworks were being launched, the general location of where they would burst etc. I couldn’t have been more wrong! My full battery turned out to be not full at all, my remote trigger decided that it didn’t want to work consistently and I found my 17-40 lens not quite getting it all, after a while I stopped trying and just watched. While packing up, a bunch of us were talking and I’m not the only one who had remote trigger issues, the three of us were using wireless remotes (not IR) so maybe that was the issue, we all had a good laugh and called it a night. All in all good fun and good people.

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